"Ultimately, Haiku represents a different way of viewing your personal computer. If you think that software shouldn't be riddled with bugs and incompatibilities and inefficiencies, if you hate being forced to swap out your hardware and software every few years because 'upgrades' have rendered them obsolete, and if you find that the idea of using an operating system that's fast, responsive, and simple is refreshingly novel and appealing, then maybe, just maybe, Haiku is for you." What fascinates me the most is that Haiku's not working on a tablet version. How delightfully quaint.

This may sound surprising to you, but for intensive GUI interaction, a second of latency is simply huge.

To see what it is like, take some kind of watch, start counting seconds in your head, then try to imagine what would happen if scrolling in your web browser took so much time to respond (you turn the mouse wheel, then one second later something starts to move on the screen). Targeting something precisely would turn out to be either impossible or extremely slow.

As part of the development of a new low-latency audio codec, Monty from Xiph has shown that people are not even able to sing a song which they know by heart in a synchronous fashion if they have to overcome a 250ms communication delay ( http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/celt/demo.html ).

Myself, I always disable GUI animations on my computers and cellphones when I can, because after you have lived without these 100-200ms of unneeded latency for a few months there is no going back. Everything just feels slow when I leave them on.

And the worst here is that modern computer hardware is more than powerful enough to work at 20ms latencies and below. It is ill-designed system software that is holding it back.